Species

Every day biodiversity is being lost at up to 1,000 times the natural rate: almost 19 thousand species out of 52 thousand assessed so far are threatened with extinction and the results of the latest assessment of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ released today show that, on average, 50 species of mammal, bird and amphibian move closer to extinction each year due to the impacts of agricultural expansion, logging, over-exploitation and invasive alien species. …

The Biodiversity Management System (BMS), launched today at the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit, represents a major milestone of the fruitful collaboration between Holcim and IUCN. The BMS provides a set of recommendations for the systematic integration of biodiversity into the building materials company's operations. …

The 12th WANI coordination meeting was held in Luang Prabang, Laos from 18 to 22 October. The meeting was set to strengthen the coordination and delivery of WANI into 2012 and beyond. Global WANI coordinators and IUCN staff, along with colleagues and partners from the Mekong region discussed in particular issues surrounding hydropower development. …

A decade of efforts by the Wild Salmon Center and partners culminates in formal protection of 94,000 acres to safeguard the critically endangered Sakhalin taimen, Siberian tiger, and other wildlife in the Russian Far East. …

IUCN scientists were part of a recent expedition, Tara Oceans, to investigate coral bleaching on the reefs of Mayotte, an island that lies to the north west of Madagascar. The team found that bleaching here, which was first reported in March this year, is the worst seen in the Indian Ocean. … | French

The ‘global extinction crisis’ has been in the news for a while now and conservationists are constantly throwing figures at us to illustrate the overwhelming scale of biodiversity loss. “Twenty-one percent of all known mammals, 29 percent of all known amphibians, 12 percent of all known birds, 35 percent of conifers and cycads, 17 percent of sharks and 27 percent of reef-building corals are threatened with extinction” - many of us could lose sleep over this alarming data. But what exactly does it mean? Who calculates these figures and how? How do we know that a particular species is Vulnerable, Endangered, or Extinct? …

A global analysis of extinction risk for the world's plants, conducted by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew together with the Natural History Museum, London and IUCN, has revealed that the world’s plants are as threatened as mammals, with one in five of the world’s plant species threatened with extinction. … | Spanish

Scientists on a global quest to rediscover "lost" amphibian species have returned from their first set of expeditions having rediscovered three species that had not been seen for decades, Conservation International (CI) and the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG) announced on the 22nd September.
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